Gershom Scholem and the Mystical Dimension of Jewish History

By Joseph Dan

“An excellent overview of the history of Jewish mysticism from its early beginnings to contemporary Hasidism . . . scholarly and complex” (Library Journal).

Over the course of more than sixty years, Gershom Scholem reassembled the scattered texts of Jewish mysticism. In a monumental work of scholarship, he catalogued and annotated these sacred writings—known collectively as Kabbalah—and restored them to their rightful place in the realm of serious study.

Now Joseph Dan, the first Gershom Scholem Professor of Kabbalah at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, provides a lucid overview of Scholem’s work. Here, Dan delves into Scholem’s history of Kabbalah and its integration into the larger fabric of Jewish history and thought.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 1, 1987
• ISBN: 9780814720974

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

THE MAN AND THE SCHOLAR

I

THREE BOOKS should be written about Gershom Scholem. This is intended to be one of them. One book should describe Scholem and the twentieth century: his background, his approach to Zionism, and his immigration to Jerusalem (subjects dealt with in his autobiography, From Berlin to Jerusalem),¹ his activity in Jerusalem and at the Hebrew University, his friendships with Agnon² and other great Jerusalem figures, his relationship with Walter Benjamin,³ his social and political views, his impact upon Israeli culture and outlook concerning its past, and all other aspects of a long, fruitful, and extremely active and influential life.

Another book should deal with Scholem the phenomenologist. How did Gershom Scholem understand the meaning of religion, mysticism, symbolism, mythology, the relationship between mysticism and language, his concept of the scholarly field of history of religions and history of ideas, his attitude toward the Freudian and Jungian schools in psychology, his understanding of Gnosticism, his concept of Judaism and Zionism, and many other similar subjects.⁴

And one book should be dedicated to Scholem’s scholarship. He worked for 63 years on a history and bibliography of Jewish mysticism and the integration of this history with the general development of Jewish history and culture. The present book intends to be this third book. It does not deal with Scholem the man and his times, nor does it deal with Scholem’s views on the general phenomenological problems which he encountered. It deals only with content, the major outlines of Scholem’s history of the kabbalah, and its integration into Jewish history.

Gershom Scholem published over 40 volumes and nearly 700 studies. About 95 percent of these pertain to the subject of this book. Readers may disagree concerning the question of what Scholem’s importance is. (They also may disagree over where his main contribution to contemporary Judaism is to be found, whether in his relationship and presentations concerning current affairs, or his contribution to the understanding of mysticism and symbolism in general, or his efforts as a historian. But there can be no doubt that Scholem spent his life being a historian in the fullest sense of the term and concentrated all his efforts in this field. It is very rare to find a young man outlining his scholarly career and then following it without deviation for nearly 60 years; but Scholem did just this. His letter to Bialik, written soon after his arrival in Jerusalem, gives the outline for almost all his subsequent work.⁵ Scholem considered that his biographical and bibliographical studies concerning various kabbalists and their works were important. He once said: All I found were scattered, shabby pages, and I transformed them into history.⁶ This is an accurate statement, without any qualifications. He saw himself as a historian, he understood his work as being historical work, he dedicated all his efforts to the study of kabbalistic texts as historical documents. There may be different views concerning what is important in his work; there can be no doubt what, in his labor, was important to him.

It is impossible to summarize in one volume the years of scholarship and publications and articles.⁷ All this book intends to bring before the reader are the broadest outlines of the contents of Jewish mysticism and its impact on Jewish religion and history. I have concentrated exclusively on Scholem’s work, but often, undoubtedly, the presentation is influenced by the works of Scholem’s disciples and subsequent work done on the same subjects. The notes, for the most part, are limited to primary sources, besides pointing out some details and comments. I have also included cases of disagreement and controversy. One can consider this work in its entirety as a survey of the current state of the study of the field as a whole.

Before we turn to a general review of Scholem’s scholarly work, a few paragraphs about his biography and his attitude toward Judaism and Zionism are in order. As stated above, there is no intention to present in this framework anything approaching either a full biography or an appreciation of his intellectual response to the main ideas with which his life brought him into contact. These are just bare outlines, to facilitate the understanding of the background of his scholarship.

II

There can be no doubt that the young Gershom Scholem was a rebellious intellectual. Nothing in the background in which he was born could explain this, however. If we compare the spiritual world in which he was born and was raised to the one he created for himself in his young manhood, only contradictions emerge. It is as if Scholem had not preserved in his later life anything from his childhood atmosphere except, most probably, a clear resolution never to return to the same values.

Scholem was born in Berlin in 1897 to a family that was a typical Jewish-German assimilationist one. In later years he used to tell the story (included also in his autobiography), that when his parents wanted to please him, they would do something like hang a picture of Herzl on their Christmas tree. There was nothing in that home that would give any basis or impetus to a stirring of a Jewish interest. Hebrew was unknown and unspoken, and the young, emerging Jewish national movement, Zionism, was completely outside the family’s realm of interest. German nationalism was the accepted norm of thinking, and the first hints of an interest in socialism were apparent. In short, it is impossible to study Scholem’s family to understand what caused him to turn to Judaism and Zionism. Nor is the paradox, like many others, clarified by Scholem’s autobiography, which one would expect to throw some light on his early development.

Scholem’s autobiography is an unusual book. While most autobiographies tend to serve their authors as a vehicle to reveal their innermost thoughts and feelings, Scholem’s From Berlin to Jerusalem concerned itself almost exclusively with external facts. That is, he gives detailed information concerning his family, relatives, studies, teachers, books he read, people he met and their background but reveals little about himself. He relates his decisions to study Hebrew, his quest for a teacher in the field of Talmud, his meetings with scholars, and similar incidents, but the natural questions arise: Why did he choose this and not that? What were his motives? What was his attitude toward the various alternatives that stood before him? On these questions there is hardly a word. The reader acquires from reading the autobiography an impressive amount of detailed information, but not a glimpse of the soul of its author, and almost no answer to the basic questionmarks surrounding his early life.

Scholem was no different even in private conversation. He enjoyed talking about his early life, about people he met, and about things he had done. Those who met him frequently and talked with him a great deal recognized most of the events included in From Berlin to Jerusalem, because they served as the basis for anecdotes he related in his conversations. However, the motives, the reasons, the emotions—these Scholem kept hidden in his book as well as in his conversations.

It was not known, until after his death in 1982, that Scholem left a large number of personal letters in his files. His widow, Fania (a relative of Freud), is working now to sort them out, arrange them chronologically and by subject, and prepare a selection for publication. There is a possibility that these letters may shed some light on the questions which we are discussing here.

If Scholem did not leave us with a statement of his motives concerning his major decisions in his early life, to some extent his actions speak for themselves. All his actions point in one direction: an intense, extreme sense of rebellion.

Not only in his early life, but throughout the 65 years of his career, Scholem was and remained a fierce foe of German nationalism. He expressed it in the most difficult circumstances during the First World War, when he belonged to the tiny minority among German Jews who opposed the war wholeheartedly and without reservation (without, however, joining the communists, who also opposed the war). He never forgave some of his friends and teachers who were carried away by the German nationalistic spirit and in one way or another supported, even if halfheartedly, the war effort. When called to army service, Scholem successfully persuaded the doctors that he was mentally unbalanced and therefore should be exempt from army service. This act never gave him any qualms nor did he express any misgivings. The war was nothing of a Jew’s concern, and he expressed in this way his complete and resolute negation of the spirit of German nationalism that prevailed in his home and toward which he felt nothing but alienation and hatred.

This basic attitude is reflected in his response in later years to the horrible questions of the Holocaust and subsequent relationships with Nazi and post-Nazi Germany. His resolute answer to Hannah Arendt concerning the evil of Nazi Germany is a clear example, but only the best-known one. In one of his essays he deals with the problem of the role of Jews in modern German culture, and points out, like nobody else before him, the stark asymmetry in the description of this process. Scholem pointed out that only Jewish writers and historians had stressed the Jewish contribution to German culture in the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth, when the Nazi regime took over. He asked: Where are the German historians who accept the thesis that Jewish spiritual force was integrated into modern German culture? Where is the German who will admit that there was a meeting (Scholem even used a sexual expression to describe such a meeting) between Judaism and Germanism in the modern period? The love affair between Jews and German culture that began in the middle of the eighteenth century was a completely one-sided one, Scholem explained; there was no expression of any German appreciation of the Jewish contribution. Nazi anti-Semitism, one may infer, was for Scholem a deep expression of the German-Jewish relationship, a far truer expression than the idyllic picture of an interrupted love affair that could have been resumed were it not for the brutal intervention of the Nazis.

How much of this did the young Scholem understand before he decided to repudiate his home and turn to Jewish nationalism and Hebrew studies? We cannot know, but it is possible to imagine that the fierceness of his rebellion reflected a deep-seated aversion toward the assimilationist world in which he was raised and that he remained steadfast and committed throughout his life to the values he adopted in his adolescent years when he rebelled against those which governed his family and his education.

It should also be noted that Scholem chose, when adopting Judaism and Zionism, the least popular alternative among those he could have followed, and probably the most difficult one. Young Jews at that time were joining various socialist and leftist groups, and the young Scholem was aware of their ideology and politics. Socialism never appealed to him, even though a great and important friendship in his life was with Walter Benjamin, a profound (though an unorthodox) socialist thinker.

To become a socialist, one did not have to study a forgotten, neglected language like Hebrew, and certainly could study texts easier to follow than the Talmud. Yet Scholem chose the most difficult way and followed it with a dedication which would characterize his attitude to every subject he would deal with throughout his life.

What came first—Zionism or Judaism? Did Scholem adopt Jewish nationalism first, and then, in order not to appear hypocritical, begin to study Jewish history, Hebrew, and the Jewish classical texts, or was it the other way round—first the interest in Hebrew and Judaism, and only later the awakening of Jewish nationalism, followed by Zionist activity? It seems from Scholem’s statements on this subject that adherence to nationalism came first, but that his cultural interest was never separated from his Zionist ideology. The two were fused together very early in his life.

It is clear that Scholem did not choose to be a student of mysticism first, and then of Jewish mysticism second. His road toward the study of the kabbalah began with the repudiation of German nationalism and of Jewish assimilationism. This brought him to the Hebrew language, to Jewish history, and to the study of the Talmud and Midrash. Only much later did he choose the neglected field of the kabbalah as the subject to which he would dedicate over 60 years of scholarly work. That is, often one reads descriptions of Scholem depicting him as a great mystic, who used scholarship as a vehicle to express his innermost feelings toward God and the creation, toward history and divine revelation. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As has been intimated above, Scholem was first and foremost a Jewish nationalist. Then he studied Jewish culture thoroughly. Only then did he become a scholar of the history of the kabbalah.

It is interesting to note how seldom the term Jewish mysticism appears in Scholem’s writings in the 1920s. He dedicated himself (as we shall see below) to the study of the history of kabbalistic texts but without characterizing them as revelations of Jewish mystical creativity. It was not until his series of lectures in New York, after which his first book in English appeared (Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism in 1941, when Scholem was 44 years old and had written nearly a hundred studies) that the subject of the relationship between the kabbalah and mysticism began to be central to his work. Scholem did not become a scholar of the kabbalah because he was a kabbalist or a mystic. He chose it after choosing Jewish nationalism over German nationalism, Hebrew culture over German culture; from among the possible Hebrew subjects to which he could have dedicated his scholarly enterprise he chose the kabbalah. Why?

Again, Scholem’s autobiography, like Scholem’s conversation, does not give a clear answer. However, when analyzing his writing on the subject, one is immediately faced with Scholem’s sense of outrage, outrage at the treatment that the kabbalah had received from previous generations of scholars who had dealt with it. It was not only the sense of following a neglected field that inspired him but also the thought that he could correct the mistakes of those who had published on the kabbalah. One example was the scholar who wrote extensively on the kabbalah. When Scholem admired his vast library and asked: You undoubtedly have read all these books? Scholem received the following answer: What? Do I also have to read this junk?

Modern scholars, too, reflected the ignorance Scholem found in the writings of his predecessors, the historians and scholars of the nineteenth century. They not only neglected the kabbalah, but they hated it and expressed this hatred in emotional terms in their putatively scholarly analyses. Several statements of Scholem’s, describing his early career in the field of kabbalah, express his sense of indignation at this attitude, an attitude for which he could find no justification whatsoever. When reading kabbalistic texts he felt as if he were the first scholar to ever read them. Accordingly his researches gave him a sense of pioneering adventure, a feeling akin to the discovery of an unknown continent. To a dedicated historian, experienced in the study of subjects on which whole libraries have been written and for whom the chance of making a really significant discovery is slim, this sense of discovery provided a most unusual experience and one which caused Scholem great satisfaction.

How can we explain the various reasons that caused Scholem to choose Jewish mysticism as a subject of his scholarship? Did his rejectionist mood carry him away from Jewish assimilationism and German nationalism to Zionism and Jewish culture? Was he reacting in the same way toward those previous Jewish historians and scholars who treated the kabbalah with such disdain? Did he select the works that historians had mistaken or brushed aside with the conviction that a meaningful life of intellectual adventure waited for him there? And was there an element of empathy toward forgotten mystics, who brought out a mystical spark in his soul?

The last cannot be denied, but should not be overemphasized, at least when trying to understand Scholem’s initial choice of the book Bahir as a subject for his Ph.D. thesis. When we actually read his thesis, and follow it up by reading his published scholarly monographs produced in the first years of his stay in Jerusalem, we do not find much of a sense of empathy and connectedness, certainly not when compared to that found in his later works. The enthusiasm of his essay on Sabbatianism, Redemption Through Sin, is completely lacking. Most of the work on the Bahir consists of notes and references, and very little revelation of the mystical gnostic spirit of the Bahir can be gleaned from these pages. The same is true concerning his long papers in the first numbers of the Israeli journals Tarbiz and Kiryat Sefer, which were the fruit of the first ten years of his scholarly career, nor in his first books to be written after the thesis, his bibliography of kabbalistic works, Bibliographia Kabbalistica, and a second volume of bibliography, Kitvey Yad be-Kabbalah, which was a list of the Hebrew kabbalistic manuscripts in the possession of the National and University Library in Jerusalem.

Did the young Scholem successfully hide his innermost empathy with mysticism in these early studies, or is it that it developed somewhat later in his scholarly career? We cannot really know. It is my belief that both alternatives are at least partially correct. Scholem’s early works are written in a strict—too strict—conformity to historical-philological norms, covering details in great length, presenting before the reader the writer’s reasoning, doubts, and contradictory alternatives to his own interpretations in a way which he was to follow in later years, but with much greater emphasis and a heightened sense of importance. It is as if Scholem were trying to prove that this, too, is history, and to convey this fact by the literary style and organization of his articles. If this was indeed his attitude, it is understandable that he forbade himself from revealing his subjectivity in any way, trying instead to present the material as if it were completely remote from his feelings. It is therefore, possible that he had an intense feeling of empathy, but that he concealed it completely.

To the contrary, I believe that it is evident that as the years passed, with material accumulating and knowledge growing, Scholem became more and more fascinated and, one might even say, conquered by the material with which he was dealing. In the early studies one hardly finds expressions which define the general historical meaning of the kabbalistic sources. In the period after 1935, such expressions are increased greatly, and Scholem’s conviction of the meaningfulness and relevance of his field of study to every aspect of Jewish culture increased dramatically. The enormous interest evoked by his first publications concerning Sabbatianism demonstrated that he was correct in pointing out the rich spiritual values hidden in the kabbalistic texts. With this reinforcement, Scholem’s subjective acceptance of the symbols of the kabbalah also increased. That is, unlike some of my colleagues and Scholem’s friends, I do not believe that Scholem was inclined toward mysticism in general when he chose the field of kabbalah around 1020 It seems to me that if Scholem, as a person, had been mystically inclined, he would have revealed more interest in mysticism in general throughout his academic career. It is a fact, however, that Scholem strictly confined himself to Jewish mysticism, and strayed to generalizations concerning religion, mysticism and the history of ideas only when he was writing brief introductions to the study of a Jewish idea or symbol. Mysticism per se, as a generalization within which Jewish mysticism is a detail, did interest him only tangentially. As stated above, it is very difficult to know whether he was involved with anything except the truth beyond kabbalistic symbolism as a 20-year-old. Also, as has been discussed above, no mystical tendency is revealed in his early papers, and very little can be gleaned about it in his later ones. Yet because Scholem did not present the kabbalistic texts just as history and nothing more, he most probably did believe that they (not all, of course, but the best and most profound) contained a transcendent spark, something beyond the mere literary and religious expression of a particular cultural attitude.

It is important to emphasize that Scholem’s involvement with the texts he was studying never influenced his historical analyses. Scholem did not choose—or neglect—the subjects he discussed and dissected according to his preference, nor according to his belief in the transcendent spark of truth he believed they contained. One example demonstrates this fact.

It would be difficult to find anything that Scholem wrote with more enthusiasm, empathy and keen historical analysis than his study of the career of Moshe Dobrushka, a follower of the great Sabbatian radical heretic, Jacob Frank (to be discussed in Chapter 12). Yet Scholem’s repugnance of Frankist anarchistic and destructive attitudes and their anti-Jewish activity is evident in many of his works, including his first programmatic essay, Redemption Through Sin. His interest in Dobrushka’s career is purely the consequence of a deep satisfaction gained from the study of hundreds of documents in half a dozen languages. There is no identification with the hero, and certainly no inclination to embrace his political or theological views, nor is there any ethical acceptance of his bizarre actions.

It is sometimes stated that Scholem was interested in the heretical, anarchistic movements among Jewish mystics, thus revealing his own tendencies. This does not have any basis in the facts. Scholem did not dedicate more energy and interest to the Frankist movement, for instance, than to the rather conservative and moderate circle of kabbalists in Gerona (northern Spain) in the first half of the thirteenth century. He did not dedicate more space or time to the study of the Sabbatian movement than he did to the book Bahir and the early kabbalah. Why, therefore, this persistent impression, found in so many descriptions of Scholem’s outlook?

The answer is rather simple. This impression is not based on what Scholem actually did, but on what his readers preferred to study. Few people read his books on the early kabbalah, while his studies on Sabbatianism and Frankism have, since the 1950s, become part of Israeli culture. The questions, therefore, should not be directed toward Scholem, but rather toward our generation: Why are we so interested in the anarchic and unorthodox in the Jewish past? Is it because we feel ourselves to be, in relation to our forefathers, anarchistic and revolutionary, and hence we seek justification for our own efforts at anarchy from previous examples?

Scholem did not cover every subject, nor did he exhaust many that he did concern himself with in the history of Jewish mysticism, even though he did seek to present at least an outline of every phase and phenomenon and chose which to enlarge upon according to their intrinsic historical and cultural significance. His own preferences and beliefs remained very far in the background of his scholarly efforts, contrary to the preferences of some who read his work.

Reading through Scholem’s scholarly books and articles may give an incorrect impression. Scholem was very careful to publish only the things he understood, and not the things he did not know. When one reads his publications, there is an impression of clarity and conclusiveness, as if everything were now clear and all problems solved. But this impression is completely mistaken. Scholem, for instance, kept a copy of each of his publications bound with empty pages intervening between every two pages of printed text, and used these inserted pages to write down notes, additions, changes, and added information. In some of his works the added pages include more material than the printed ones. He never regarded any of his studies as complete; the publication was the report of the situation as he viewed it at that time, but he intended to rewrite and reformulate large parts of his publications. In later years he republished, in corrected and enlarged form, several early studies to which he had a great deal to add, like those on kabbalah and alchemy,⁸ on Rabbi Joseph dela Reina,⁹ on the early concept of the kawanah in prayer and others.¹⁰ Every new edition or translation of his books included new material, new information and sometimes even changes of point of view.¹¹

III

Scholem’s preoccupation with bibliography is legendary, and it is another side to the intensity with which he collected and built his own library. It must be stressed, however, that in the first fifteen years of Scholem’s work in Jerusalem there was an inherent unity in his work and achievements in the three fields: the study of kabbalah, his work in Jewish bibliography, with emphasis on kabbalah, and the building of his library, the core of which is the collection of kabbalistica.

Bibliography, for Scholem, was the basic, and sometimes even the final, product of scholarship. It is not an accident that the first two major works he prepared and published after his Ph.D. thesis were bibliographies: Bibliographia Kabbalistica¹² and List of Kabbalistic Manuscripts at the National and University Library in Jerusalem.¹³ He began his academic career in Jerusalem as a Judaica librarian at the National and University Library, a chapter vividly described in his autobiography. He did not describe the enormous accomplishment of preparing a directory for the adaptation of the Dewey Decimal System to the needs of Judaica, a directory that was updated several times and serves to this day for the classification of Judaica books in the National Library and many other Judaica libraries in Israel and abroad.

Scholem’s intensity regarding the study of books was apparent in his scholarship in the twenties and early thirties. Many of his articles were published in Kiryat Sefer, the bibliographical publication of the National library, which lists all books pertaining to Judaica to arrive at the Library, and allots some of its space to scholarly studies related to Judaica bibliography. Scholem published his major articles in Kiryat Sefer under the common title Studies in the History of Kabbalistic Literature.¹⁴

Meanwhile Scholem was building his private library. The emphasis was on everything connected to Jewish mysticism.

In various editions of his famous brochure Alu le-Shalom, (Ascend to Scholem) he listed his bibliographical desiderata. When a book appeared on that list, its price immediately tripled. It became obvious to Scholem that his modest means would never enable him to collect kabbalistic manuscripts, so instead he helped the National Library build a comprehensive collection in the field. After his death, his collection became an integral part of the National and University Library’s Gershom Scholem Center for the Study of Kabbalah.

IV

Scholem’s studies in 15 years from 1921 to 1936 covered all periods in the history of Jewish mysticism and most of its main subjects, from the ancient Hekhalot mysticism of the Talmudic period to ninth-century Hasidism, a span of a millennium and a half.¹⁵

During this time, Scholem attempted to absorb and organize the vast material of Jewish mysticism, to master it, and to allot each work, treatise, and writer its proper slot in the history of kabbalah. At the same time he began to publish works intended to cover all major areas of kabbalistic creativity and to present a coherent picture of the development of kabbalistic literature. Scholem’s main comprehensive achievement of this period was his extensive article on kabbalah in the German Encyclopaedia Judaica—the first scholarly history of Jewish mysticism ever written.¹⁶

V

Between 1921 and 1936, Scholem concentrated on finding, copying, and analyzing every kabbalistic manuscript he could reach. Scholem travelled from library to library in Europe (and later in the United States) and collected information from scholarly catalogues and from bookseller’s lists. By the comprehensive study of the manuscripts, and by the mastery of the printed kabbalistic texts, Scholem achieved a full, comprehensive knowledge of the history of the kabbalah. His published papers in this period reflect this.

Judging from his publications, one group of kabbalists interested him more